How would you like to have one wish granted? That’s sure what Fang wanted, even if it was just to get some food! Dive into the world of Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force and watch as one wish turns into a quest to save the world!
Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force is a remake of the original Fairy Fencer F game. With the jump to PS4, Advent Dark Force adds new storyline dungeons, as well as the ability to have up to six party members in battle once. I had reviewed the original game back when it first came out, and this remake on PS4 gave me a chance to see the game through fresh eyes. If you would like to see my thoughts on the main plot and basic mechanics of the game, please check my review of the original title.
In the original Fairy Fencer F game, one of my biggest complaints was the time travel portion of the plot. This complaint still stays very valid, and even with the addition of an extra dungeon it still felt fairly poorly handled. What that extra dungeon did help with was the difficulty spike that occurred post-time travel. Being able to get the bonus experience out of the dungeon went a long way for the following dungeons to not be completely awful.
Side quests in Advent Dark Force feel very much the same as they were in Fairy Fencer F. This time around I knew that I needed to be sure to actually go through and complete them. This, along with doing a decent bit of grinding within the Shukesoo’s Tower, really helped out with my money situation, especially since I learned (after my review of the original) that to get a certain bonus party member you needed to have Fang be level 40. This made it so that I could always afford Lola’s absurd prices as well.
Shukesoo’s Tower is an optional area in which you go floor-by-floor defeating enemies until you’re able to conquer the top. The amount of floors you have available to you is determined by the number of furies you have stabbed into the ground. The big thing to keep in mind here is that the furies you have planted into the world do not actually affect the tower itself for world shaping. While Shukesoo’s Tower isn’t new to the PS4 version, I hadn’t actually played any of it on the PS3 version.
One of the biggest changes to the gameplay in the PS4 version is the fact you can now have six party members in battle at once. Along with this, you also have the ability to adjust the difficulty between one of three different options – Easy, Normal, and Hard (with another two being added through free DLC). For the purposes of the review, I played through on Normal, only changing to hard to try and get some drops. Compared to what I remembered of the first game, the game felt a fair bit easier on normal, most likely due to the six-person teams you had available to you.
For those unaware, Fairy Fencer F plays out as a turn-based system, very similar to how the Hyperdimension series plays out. You will move your characters within an area, needing to move within an attackable range in order to hit them. You can upgrade how wide your attack range is – along with a bunch of other upgrades – through the Weapon Boost option in the menu.
Six party members means more turns you are able to get in general, as well as less people you have to leave on the sidelines. The flipside to this is that the field of battle has not increased in size, so you will have more people clumped up close to each other. Enemies will often take advantage of this, whacking several party members at once with a conal attack. Be ready to need to bust out the healing more often if you decide to dive into Advent Dark Force!
One thing I don’t remember abusing nearly as much in the original game, likely due to the higher difficulty that was present, is the World Shaping. As you collect the Furies from throughout the world and use them to release the Goddess and/or Vile God, you’ll be able to give these special fairies (that reside in the Furies) powers to shape the world. These powers can give you bonuses like added experience, added WP (Weapon Points for use in Weapon Boost), added money, changing enemies in the field, and so on! You can stack as many as you can fit onto a single area, giving you a wide variety of effects (or debuffs, since they almost always have a negative side as well). This can really greatly aid in trying to do your best to improve your current party, and planting these into the ground is absolutely vital to doing the Shukesoo’s Tower.
As far as the graphics and sound go in Advent Dark Force, I didn’t really notice much of a difference. The game does look a bit cleaner due to the upgrade, but other than that I really didn’t notice much.
In a comparison of just Fairy Fencer F versus Advent Dark Force, Advent Dark Force would win by a landslide. The difficulty settings, six-person parties, and the vastly smoothed out difficulty spike are just massive upsides to this version, not to mention the fact that there’s an entirely new plot line to follow (the Evil Goddess story) so you get additional storyline elements. With that said, I still disliked the whole time travel plot point, though I was a lot more numb to it this time around since I knew it was coming.
As it stands, I would recommend this game so long as you’re prepared for the time travel part. If you were already considering purchasing the original game then I would definitely recommend Advent Dark Force over that. The game just felt a lot smoother as a whole, minus the time leap and losing your party members part.
Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force Review Score
4/5
Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force is available now for PS4 via PSN and Amazon.
I would like to thank Idea Factory for providing me with a key for review purposes.
